The doctor’s office seems like the last bastion of magazines. Thumbing through the latest edition of Men’s Health or Time is practically a right of passage, sometimes endurance, before your nurse calls your name. Now they are just dust collectors. Instead of staring at glossy pages, as David Carr recently pointed out, we are reading our phones.

While our methods for consuming our information and entertainment has changed radically our bias toward its price has not. We are a culture of media cheapskates. You may complain about your recent cable bill but that tenth spinoff of Law & Order is heavily subsidized by someone or something else(hint: advertising). The same is true for almost all other forms of media.

The eyeballs equal ad revenue equation just isn’t working anymore. Both numbers continue to fall. Publishers are trying to figure out other sources of revenue and most are counting on some form of digital distribution to eventually be the savior. So far, we are still a bunch of cheapskates. We get our information from non-paywall protected websites or news aggregators like Flipboard.

At some we’ll have to pay the piper or he just might take it all away.

photo: sophiea